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After losing his father to prostate cancer, writer Peter Moffat is using Silk scripts to educate men about the disease

On the wall of Peter Moffat’s kitchen is a large photograph of his father,
Jack. A tall, well-muscled man with a handsome moustache, he is swinging a
straw basket from each hand. Peering out of one basket is his young son, a
delighted grin on his face.

To Peter Moffat, the Bafta-winning writer of such acclaimed TV series as Silk,
Criminal Justiceand The Village, his father seemed the epitome
of masculine invulnerability. Despite coming from a working-class Scottish
background, he had worked his way up to the rank of colonel in the British
Army. “He was a proper leader,” Moffat recalls. “He always said he wouldn’t
ask his men to do anything he wasn’t prepared to do himself. Lots of my
memories are of him being glamorous in uniform, going to the officers’ mess
to drink gin and tonics. When he commanded a regiment in West Belfast, he’d
be picked up by two men in the Land Rover every morning, and they would all
be carrying guns. That was my childhood picture of him.”

Trained to cope with danger and discomfort, it’s perhaps unsurprising that
when Jack Moffat began to experience urinary problems in his sixties, his
instinct was to ignore them. “His big thing in life was not wanting to worry
anyone,” Moffat sighs. “The first we heard about anything being wrong was
when he went into hospital for day surgery on a routine eye operation. He
came out, everything was fine, and he said: ‘Right, now I’ve got that out of
the way I’m going to get my waterworks seen to.’ That was the first inkling
any of us had that there was an issue.”

In fact, his father was suffering from prostate cancer, and by the time it was
diagnosed, it had metastasised. He had secondary cancers in his skull, spine
and pelvis, which eventually proved fatal.

“He had the classic symptom of having to get up all the time to go to the
toilet. If he had done something about it earlier, he might still be around.
He might well have been saved,” Moffat says. “It’s all wrapped up in the
same problem: a failure to think about and talk about an illness which
belongs in your nether regions.” Now, he hopes to prevent other men from
dying of embarrassment by raising awareness of the condition in his scripts.

As fans of the legal drama Silk will be aware, Billy Lamb, the chief
clerk, played by Neil Stuke, had terminal prostate cancer diagnosed in the
second series. When the third series begins early next year, viewers will
watch him coping with the illness and the side effects of the hormone
therapy used to treat it. “I’m motivated by the desire to inform people to
watch out for it,” Moffat says.

“The diagnosis is terminal, it’s a question of how long he’s got. So in a
really crass way, dramatically, there’s a sword of Damocles hanging over
him. Billy is a real bloke, it’s important to him to go to the pub and be
noisy and successful. With a character like that, it was a good opportunity
to entertain and educate in that Reithian way — keeping the education as
quiet as possible — about the illness that men find so difficult to talk
about. What happens with hormonal therapy is that it halts the cancer, holds
it in abeyance, but there will always be a time when the cancer gets going
again. And it’s different in every case.”

By the time Moffat’s father had the disease diagnosed, at the age of 67, the
prognosis was that he might have two more years at the outside. “We had this
family event every year, where we’d all meet up and go to the beach at Wells
in Norfolk and have a laugh. He took me and my sister into the beach hut and
made a cup of tea and said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you’.”

Once Moffat had got over the shock of his father’s news, he tried to find out
as much as he could about the disease. “I crashed around hopelessly for
months, looking things up on the internet. PSA tests, Gleason score — what
are these things? We were all really badly informed.”

Fearing his father might only have months left to live, Moffat invited his
parents on a family holiday to Italy that turned out to be something of a
disaster. “It was 40 degrees and he was having hot flushes as a side effect
of the hormone therapy, so he was pouring with sweat constantly. We didn’t
know that would be a side effect, because we hadn’t talked about it
properly. I don’t like making the comparison, but I’m fairly sure those
levels of information for someone who has breast cancer would be more easily
available.

“The key thing for me was ringing up Prostate Cancer UK and speaking to a
health professional whose job it is to talk to people about it. And suddenly
everything got translated.”

Now, Moffat has the statistics at his fingertips. “If you’re over 50, and
someone in the family has had it, you’re two and a half times more likely to
get it. If you’re Afro-Caribbean you’re four times more likely to have it,”
he tells me. “So if you’re getting up five times in the night to pee, it’s
madness to ignore it — but many people do. I’ve actually heard somebody say
‘I’d rather die than have a doctor put his finger up my bottom’.”

Moffat is an affable, softly spoken man, but there’s no doubting his anger
about what he sees as the complacency and ignorance surrounding this
disease. “Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and the fourth
most common cancer overall, but it’s 20th in the league table in terms of
the money spent in research per number of diagnoses. It’s way down there.
That makes me furious,” he says. “Roughly speaking, the same number of men
per year have prostate cancer diagnosed as women with breast cancer, but the
spend on breast cancer is more than double.” The PSA test, which measures
the level of a protein produced by the prostate gland, is notoriously
unreliable: there are several causes of an elevated PSA result, while some
men who have prostate cancer do not have elevated PSA. “I think we should be
working a lot harder on developing a decent test, because by 2030 it will be
the most common cancer.”

He thinks the comparative lack of urgency around the condition is due to a
fatal combination of embarrassment and machismo. “And men don’t like to
admit they’re ill. All men, regardless of background, can be terrible about
addressing medical issues.” Moffat launches into an indignant diatribe about
the Prime Minister, whom he heard addressing Parliament about “prostrate”
cancer during the Movember campaign. “He said it twice. And he’s done that
before, which is interesting. That suggests to me that as a typical
fortysomething male, the Prime Minister spends no time thinking about the
most common cause of male cancer death. It’s a common problem, but it’s
outrageous. Get the bloody word right!”

Watching his father die has naturally heightened Moffat’s awareness of his own
mortality. Eighteen months ago, he went on a week’s cycling holiday with his
younger daughter and, after his return, started urinating blood. “I went
straight to the doctor and had all sorts of tests and I was completely clear
— it was caused by the cycling,” he says. “But I probably should be tested
again soon, as I am over 50 and my dad had prostate cancer reasonably
young.”

Despite the doctors’ gloomy prognosis, his father actually lived for a further
seven years, dying two and a half years ago at the age of 74. Moffat is
grateful for the extra time, which allowed them to become much closer. “My
father was a man’s man, but treated with hormone therapy, he became much
more of a woman,” he says with a wry smile.

“That treatment takes away your production of testosterone, so he became much
more relaxed, he would talk about everything and we really connected. It was
the single upside of that treatment.” During the course of these long,
intimate conversations, his father began talking for the first time about
his own rural Scottish roots. Fascinated by stories of his
great-grandfather, a shepherd who went to bed when it got dark and fed his
dogs on porridge, Moffat determined to portray that lifestyle on screen. The
result is The Village, his magisterial BBC series set in a rural
Derbyshire village at the beginning of the 20th century. “The sad thing is
that my father never got to see it.”

By the end, the cancer and the treatment had diminished the once
larger-than-life Jack Moffat.

“But he fought very hard against that,” Moffat says. “Anyone who visited him
in hospital was walked to the front door by my dad. It was 150m away and it
would take him 15 minutes. And then he’d walk all the way back again. Right
to the end, he was always saying, ‘I’m fine, don’t bother with me’. Even
though he was terminally ill and in lots of pain, he wanted to say that
someone else needed help more than he did.” This behaviour sounds heroic,
but Moffat feels that it may actually be part of the problem: “I feel angry
with a society that isn’t speaking loudly enough about a condition for
people like him to feel able to do something about their symptoms.”

Deloitte, the professional services firm, will match Times readers’
donations to Prostate Cancer UK up to £60,000. To donate to The Times
Christmas Appeal, go to times.charitiestrust.org